The Speaker and the Hegemon
by Flame Tigress
Summary: "I know who wrote it. If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me." -- The dying Hegemon sends Ender and Valentine an ansible message. How does Ender make the decision to speak for the brother who was his enemy?


****

Disclaimer: _Ender's Game_ was written by Orson Scott Card; all characters and events, etc. therein belong to him, not me, but you already knew that.

****

Author's Note: I went to Europe for two weeks and didn't bring enough books, and I didn't really want to reread them over and over, so I turned to writing fanfiction and cranked out three stories (well, vignettes, really) and a poem ("The Rite" – it's about Peter skinning squirrels. You may want to check it out, if you don't mind weird creepy sh*t). This is one of the stories (well, duh). 

I don't know much about how O.S.C. intended the ansible technology to be operated, so I'm sorry if my concept of it is a little screwy.

****

The Speaker and the Hegemon

Valentine Wiggin sat in the kitchen, reading the newsnet page projected above the table – or rather, looking at the pictures. It had been a long time since she had last seen her brother Peter – so long for her that she could scarcely remember what he had looked like when she left; so long for him that she had no idea what he would look like now, touched by the brush of age.

She stopped scrolling on the page when she came to a soundless vid clip of the 25-year-old Hegemon getting into a limousine, smiling briefly at the reporters and photographers all around him with a somewhat harassed expression on his handsome, boyish face, with tendrils of his dark curly hair falling across his forehead. The caption beneath the vid – which had started again from the beginning and was showing the young Hegemon walking briskly out of an official-looking building, flanked by black-suited guards – read, "Believe it or not, Peter Wiggin won worldwide respect and influence on the nets as Locke before the world had seen this handsome face." Valentine laughed silently. _That isn't the half of it,_ she thought ironically. _Believe it or not, Peter Wiggin won worldwide respect and influence when he was twelve years old. Believe it or not, Peter Wiggin, possessor of that handsome face, staked squirrels to the ground and skinned them to watch them die, and then was elected Hegemon. Believe it or not, Peter Wiggin once wanted to kill his brother, Ender Wiggin. _The _Ender._

Ignoring the text that was, no doubt, extolling the virtues and excusing the failings of the great Hegemon, Valentine continued to scroll down until she reached a still photo of Peter, probably in his thirties, bent over the desk of his office. His brow was furrowed in indecision and worry; his fingers were raking through his dark hair, which was askew more than his customary – and calculated, naturally – boyish tousle. But despite his worn-out, somewhat disheveled appearance, Peter remained…attractive, at least. Beautiful, in a way. With a face that could have belonged to Alexander the Great, puzzling how to launch his assault on Persia.

"I bet I've looked worse than that," Ender remarked offhandedly, wandering into the kitchen to briefly glance over his sister's shoulder before heading straight for the refrigerator. Valentine winced inwardly at his words. She could feel, in something deeper than his tone or his manner, that he forced himself to speak casually about his days in Command School, systematically destroying himself while preparing to utterly destroy his enemy. Those months haunted Ender more deeply than he wanted to live with from day to day.

These thoughts were disrupted by Ender's somewhat sarcastic query of, "Why the 'History Net Special: The Life of the Hegemon'?" Then a stricken look came over his face. "He's not – "

"He's old, Ender," Valentine interrupted gently. "He had a heart attack recently. He even made a speech saying that he would soon be 'unable to fulfill the duties of Hegemon,' and – " she scrolled back to the top of the long article she was scanning – "and 'billions laughed with tears in their eyes as they wondered if that would be the last time they ever heard their beloved leader's customary wit.' Peter's dying; the world knows it."

"Seventy-seven," Ender murmured, doing some quick mental math while sliding into his chair and setting down the jug of orange juice he was holding. "It seems so young."

"Well, he's had a lot of stress in his life," Valentine remarked. She smiled wryly at her own morbid humor. "One of the occupational hazards of ruling the world."

Ender ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, uncannily mirroring the photo of his older brother. "So, has he spared a word of farewell for his dear, departed siblings?" Ender asked, his tone as dry as Valentine's.

Valentine answered by pushing a sheet of paper, one which were printed the scant two lines of an ansible message, toward her brother.

_I know who wrote it,_ the paper read. _If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me._

Ender stared at the paper with the deadened expression of someone who has just received a very hard blow to the gut and is still too shocked to quite register or absorb it. He looked up at Valentine, the blankness in his eyes a wordless question.

"Demosthenes appended the Hive Queen to his history of the Bugger Wars," Valentine explained.

"But how – ?" Ender began dully, then left off.

"He knows you, Ender," Valentine said sadly. "He knows that you have the capacity to hurt and destroy, but also the desire to heal and rebuild. He knows what you know: that you have my empathy as well as his ruthlessness; before you crush your enemy you must understand him – her – and as soon as you understand her, you must love her, but as soon as you love and understand her, you must destroy her. After the Wars, I told Peter that much of what you said to me on that lake. So Peter knows that only the one who understood the buggers enough to destroy them could love them enough to understand them – only the killer could Speak for the Dead." Even as the memory of what the hardened ten-year-old Ender had told her at the lake in North Carolina caused her terrible grief, Valentine smiled inwardly at her own turn of phrase and half thanked Peter for it. It was Demosthenes' eloquence that Valentine occasionally borrowed.

But Ender shook his head at her words. "No," he said hoarsely. "How – how could I speak for Peter? If I've never destroyed him, how could I love him?"

Valentine's eyes filled with tears, but they did not spill over. "Have you ever destroyed me, Ender?" she asked softly.

"It's different," Ender protested, his voice still sounding as if it hurt to talk. "Peter is – "

"Your enemy?" It was neither an accusation nor a taunt, which would have been the two expressions Ender would have expected his sister to give such words. No, those were the expressions Ender himself would have used. Or that Peter would have used. Valentine's question was merely a gentle probe, and it was the very absence of an attack that turned Ender defensive.

"Isn't that what he means?" Ender demanded. "_If he can speak for the buggers, surely he can speak for me – _doesn't he mean, 'If he can speak for one hated enemy, surely he can speak for another'?"

"Maybe," Valentine replied. "Maybe on the surface. But I think he means – 'if he can learn to love one hated enemy, surely he can learn to love another.' You say that you cannot understand another's motives without seeing you own heart's desires in those motives – that is how you come to love your enemy. Perhaps Peter means that if you can see yourself in the enemy that was an utterly alien creature that you thought aimed to destroy the earth and everything on it that you loved, surely you could see yourself in the enemy who is your brother, and come to understand him."

"I told you that day on the lake," said Ender, "that Peter was the enemy I could never defeat. Is it because I didn't understand him enough? Didn't love him enough? Surely it was never because I couldn't see myself in him. Only I saw in him the part of myself I hated."

"Maybe you could love him, even though you once saw his face on the darker side of yourself, because you _can_ see yourself in him. He too has struggled against his darker impulses and triumphed."

"And you used to assure me that I was nothing like Peter," Ender said dryly, looking almost hurt.

Valentine sighed. "He's different now, Ender. He doesn't skin squirrels as sacrifices in the woods anymore."

"What?" Ender said, horrified, then quickly decided, "Don't tell me – I don't want to know."

"I can't honestly say that he's my enemy anymore," Valentine continued thoughtfully. "It used to be so clear – it was Peter against us. Then it was me betraying you by yielding to the will of the enemy."

"Val…" Ender began sympathetically, but she cut him off.

"Then suddenly I knew the wells of Peter's twisted heart and you were a stranger. I loved you no less," Valentine added quickly. "But I couldn't hate Peter anymore. Not when I began to believe that aside from wanting to take over the world, he manipulated world politics – not to mention me – because he truly wanted to save lives and nations from war. And now that he's done just that…" Valentine shrugged.

"And why?" Ender pressed impatiently. "Why does he want me to speak for him, and let the world hear what _I_ have to say for him?"

"I think he knows you'll tell the truth," Valentine replied slowly, thinking of the praise-laden newsnet article she had been skimming earlier. "I think he wants history to know who he truly was, and not to think he was a caricature of one side of a human being. He doesn't need a biographer who will just laud him as the miraculous leader who held the world together during the wars that nearly tore it apart, and then healed the world's wounds when the wars were done. No, he'll get plenty of those without asking for it; that's the stuff everyone knows about. He wants someone who _will_ tell about skinning squirrels in the woods and threatening to kill his younger siblings, but won't hate him for it. Someone who'll look at both the would-be murderer Peter and the peacemaker Peter and say, 'Why is everyone so surprised they're the same person?'"

"And how does he know he'll get that from me?"

"Like I said, Peter knows that you can come to understand even your enemies. In the Hive Queen, even with all the description of the beauty and harmony of their society, you – or the hive queen herself, really – didn't try to excuse the fact that they killed humans. They're sorry for it, and they've paid the ultimate price, but they still know it was wrong. If you were to speak as Peter's voice, neither you nor he would try to excuse what he did as a child – it was horrible and cruel, and none of the wonderful things he did as Hegemon can _erase_ it. But neither do the sins of his childhood lessen his great deeds. If the Speaker for the Dead speaks for Peter as he did for the hive queen, then Peter will be able to say from the grave the truth he wants said. But," Valentine continued with a hint of admonition in her voice and her small smile, "the Speaker for the Dead must speak as he did for the hive queen – for someone who is not his enemy anymore."

"I don't know how to think of Peter if not as my worst enemy and the face of my darkest nightmares," Ender said ironically.

"As your brother," Valentine offered with simple sincerity at the same moment that Ender resignedly answered his own question: "My brother, I know, I know." They looked at each other and grinned.

Ender stood up, walked to the spoken ansible receiver (they had become so common during the years that he and Valentine had spent space traveling at relativistic speeds that they were now to be found in all but the poorest homes), picked it up, and dialed a number. A machine's voice answered, "Type in your search query."

Office of the Hegemony, Ender typed carefully. Almost instantly the screen beside the receiver came up with the number. Ender memorized it, hung up, picked up, dialed hesitantly. His stomach was twisting itself in knots when a secretary's voice answered, "Office of the Hegemon. Please hold." An eternity – then, "Please state your name and business."

Ender licked dry lips, and when his voice at first came out as a croak, he cleared his throat and swallowed. "Andr – Ender Wiggin," he said. I'd like to speak with the Hegemon. But tell him, " he rushed on, "tell him – 'You knew who wrote it, and he will speak for you.'"

"Please wait," the secretary said. Only a touch of skepticism crept into her tone of voice, but Ender knew she didn't believe him and didn't trust the cryptic message.

He waited another eternity. Valentine was watching him steadily, patiently, but he could see the anxiousness in her eyes. With his nerves strung out as they were, Ender almost laughed to see the pitcher of orange juice standing forgotten on the kitchen table beside the newsnet hologram and its two photos of the Hegemon: the young, handsome Peter Wiggin waving smoothly and smiling with practiced patience; and an old man that Ender could almost recognize as Peter, his face weathered, withered, and thin, worn by time and care, and his thick, rippled hair sparser and grayed. _He's old, Ender. Peter's dying; the world knows it._

After an age of silence from the ansible, there cane the sound of someone's shallow breathing, and no more for several interminable seconds. Then a voice, deepened by maturity and roughened by age but still familiar somehow, said with a touch of tentative humor, "Ho, Ender."

_He must have learned that from advisers who were Battle School graduates,_ Ender thought. _Maybe even the ones I knew – Alai, Shen, Bean, Petra. Maybe they served the Hegemon._

I wonder if he still envies the ones who were judged worthy of that revered institution. I wonder if it hurts him to greet me as if he were one of them. One of us.

"Peter is – " "Your enemy?" No. No, he's not my enemy. He addressed me as a friend. A comrade. A brother.

So Ender greeted Peter with the highest compliment he could give him; the greatest congratulations for achieving as Hegemon more than he ever could have in the Battle School whose denizens he so envied; and the surest offering of peace and extension of the hand of friendship and brotherhood in a higher sense than that of blood. Brotherhood-in-arms.

"Ho, Peter," Ender replied.


End file.
